Quick Review of Day 4

This will be a quick review because I am dead tired. It's 11 PM here and I think the trip over is really starting to catch up with all of us. We start the all day children's ministries tomorrow so we will need some rest.

Today each of the 3 teams went to a village church and participated in the services. Josh, Chris, Ken and I spoke at the different venues (Josh broke off from our team and spoke at Maranata in Campina, which is Pastor Vasile's church). Our team members also gave testimonies at the churches and did some music.

It was very interesting to see and hear how they do worship here. Much of the service centers around prayer and it is open to anyone in the congregation who feels led...and most of them do. People all around the room, including the teenagers, will pray and this will happen 2 or 3 times during the service. I could only understand 2 or 3 words that they were saying but it was moving to hear the passion of the people as they prayed and to hear the others respond to what was being said. One of the few words I know is the Romanian word for 'thank you' and it would be repeated many times during each prayer.

It's wonderful to see how these folks have so much less than we and they still have sweet and honest worship. The service lasted about 2 hours; and this is the typical time for Sunday mornings here.

We lunched with the pastoral families at each church and the meal at each, according to the descriptions I got from the other teams, was a small feast. After we returned to the Vasile home we prepped for the coming week with our teams and then had a bit of free time before going as a group to the Sunday night service.

This was a different Sunday night service than normal for the Vasiles. The final Sunday of each month 6 different churches--from 6 different denominations--in this part of the country get together for a joint evangelistic service. There were a lot of people there...more than I ever expected. It was a very good service except the guy who preached the main sermon went for about an hour and a half. Poor Adam fell asleep and nearly fell into the floor from the pew. Funny stuff.

It's been tough to keep up the posts on the schedule I had hoped to because internet access can be rather spotty. I'm also trying to keep up with the photo uploads so keep checking the link in the posts from Saturday and Sunday.

Pray for our mission.
Mike